Thursday, November 10, 2011

Public Appearances

I've just got the confirmation that I have been accepted as speaker for the HotSOS Symposium 2012 in March next year, therefore I post here a quick update on my upcoming public appearances:

1. DOAGNext week the DOAG conference 2011 (Nürnberg, Germany) will begin. It's an impressive conference with a large number of tracks, although a lot of them are not database-centred.

Nevertheless it's certainly one of the conferences to go if you speak German and are interested in Oracle database technology (or the ever increasing range of Oracle technology in general).

Since I've again missed to negotiate a training day this year (something I hopefully will be able to do next year) I've decided to compensate this a little bit: I plan to give at least two additional sessions at the DOAG "Unconference". This will be so called "Optimizer hacking sessions" where I simply start up a SQL prompt and explore some of the most important aspects of the Cost Based Optimizer. The session's title is: "Optimizer issues - How to detect and prevent suboptimal execution plans". I hope this will be fun and educating for all of us - it is meant to be an interactive session where you're encouraged to participate by asking questions that we will try to answer by performing live exploration of the database. I've got plenty of material to talk about, starting from basic SQL statement performance troubleshooting and not ending with more advanced topics like histograms, cardinality estimates, virtual columns, extended statistics, clustering factor etc. etc. Furthermore I plan to demonstrate some cool things that you probably haven't seen yet, so I believe it's going to be a lot of fun.

If you've already received the print out with the schedule (I never understand why DOAG publishes these print outs that early given all the possible changes to the schedule until the actual start of the conference): I agreed with Heli Helskyaho from Finland when we met at this year's OOW to swap our presentation slots at DOAG, so my presentation about the Cost-Based Optimizer called "Query Transformations" will not take place on Wednesday, 9 am, but on Thursday, 3 pm, room "Kiew".

Unfortunately DOAG didn't accept the second paper I've submitted that would have been the "introductionary" session about how to read and understand execution plans, so I'll only give this more advanced session about the most important transformations that the optimizer applies to a query, why you should care and how to control them if necessary.

2. UKOUGI won't be at the UKOUG conference (December 5-7, UK, Birmingham) this year but this doesn't mean that I don't recommend going there. In fact I believe this year's conference has one of the most impressive list of speakers ever, including a number of top speakers from Oracle USA that you won't meet anywhere else across Europe, so if you can, get there - it certainly will be a top experience.

3. HotSOSIn March 2012 the 10th HotSOS Symposium (Dallas, Texas) will be held - and I'll be speaking there for the first time (about the CBO and how it calculates joins over histograms, by the way). It's a conference that I particularly look forward to for several reasons. This year is the 10th anniversary of the conference so some special activities are planned and since this is the only Oracle conference in the world dedicated to performance naturally the OakTable member "density" will be extremely high.

I hope to meet some of you at one of those events (well except UKOUG, that is) !